RH Reality Check » John McCainhttp://rhrealitycheck.org
News, commentary and analysis for reproductive and sexual health and justice.Fri, 31 Jul 2015 21:50:00 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.3Sorry, John McCain, But Anti-Choicers Are Judged on Actions, Not Wordshttp://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/11/25/sorry-john-mccain-but-anti-choicers-are-judged-on-actions-not-words/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=sorry-john-mccain-but-anti-choicers-are-judged-on-actions-not-words
http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/11/25/sorry-john-mccain-but-anti-choicers-are-judged-on-actions-not-words/#commentsSun, 25 Nov 2012 15:31:18 +0000John McCain joins the growing list of Republicans who claim that attacking reproductive rights while declining to talk about it in public will help them win elections. But that strategy has been in effect for years now, and it's not working anymore.

But as with Bobby Jindal before, if you actually listen to what he’s saying, he’s not actually telling Republicans to make substantial changes to either what policies they advocate for or even necessarily telling them to tone down their actual passion for stripping women of their reproductive rights. He’s just telling them to be quiet about it, and hope the voters don’t notice. After McCain stated that Republicans should leave the issue of abortion alone, this happened:

CHRIS WALLACE (HOST): When you say leave the issue alone, you would allow, you say, freedom of choice?

McCAIN: I would allow people to have those opinions and respect those opinions and I’m proud of my pro-life position and record, but if someone disagrees with me, I respect your views.

In other words, McCain is saying that Republicans should generously allow pro-choicers to not only have opinions but to state them. The problem with this, I hope would be obvious, is that voters, especially single women, didn’t turn out against Republicans in the polls because we believed that Republicans were trying to strip away our First Amendment right to have and state opinions. (Though perhaps McCain has behind the scenes information that I’m not privy to on this front.) Not one of the thousand bills offered by Republicans addressing reproductive rights in the past two years, either in state houses or in Congress, was an attempt to ban people from stating out loud that they believe abortion is a right. All McCain is really advising here is for Republicans to continue pushing for restrictions on abortion and contraception access, but he’s asking them to be a bit quieter about it.

The problem with this advice, which is becoming routine on cable news talk shows, is that it’s simply advising Republicans to stay the course. Both in the 2010 and 2012 elections, Republicans running for office by and large tried to avoid talking about reproductive rights, and did so only when pressed. And even then they would try to pivot and change the subject to jobs or the economy half the time. Republicans have known for eons that this issue hurts them with independent voters.

Even George W. Bush was smart enough to know to talk elliptically about abortion when asked about it. In a 2004 debate with John Kerry, when asked about his strategy for appointing Supreme Court judges, Bush described the kind of judge he wouldn’t appoint by saying, “Another example would be the Dred Scott case, which is where judges, years ago, said that the Constitution allowed slavery because of personal property rights.” It was a smart move, in that most viewers had no clue what he was talking about, but ardent anti-choicers knew he was telling them he’d appoint judges to overturn Roe v Wade, which anti-choicers erroneously compare to Dred Scott. (In fact, Roe is the opposite of Dred Scott, because it’s based on the premise that women own themselves.) It allowed him to downplay his opposition to abortion rights to independent voters, which helped him win the election.

In 2010, Republicans had massive victories in state houses and Congress because they claimed to have solutions to fix the economy. Republican campaign slogs were “Jobs jobs jobs” and “Where are the jobs?” Voters were clearly convinced that Republicans would be too busy rolling up their sleeves and getting on with creating jobs for Americans to worry about abortion. But what happened when Republicans got into office was an all-out assault on reproductive rights. The House passed one go-nowhere bill after another that attacked abortion rights and they twice tried to shut down the federal government in order to cut out contraception subsidies. And, of course, on the state level a record number of laws restricting abortion were passed.

In other words, Thomas Frank had it exactly backwards when in his famous quote describing the bait and switch Republicans play on their voters: “Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes.” In fact, many people voted Republican in 2010 to get jobs and instead got relentless attacks on abortion and contraception.

Even if Republicans get even more aggressive in self-censorship when it comes to talking about reproductive rights in public—even if they start refusing to acknowledge questions about the issue, as Romney started doing on the campaign trail already—the fact that they are attacking reproductive rights will hurt them in the polls. They won’t be able to stop Democrats from pointing out their record on reproductive rights, nor will they be able to bully the press into not covering their assaults on reproductive rights. The only way they can actually keep voters from punishing them over this issue is to stop attacking reproductive rights.

So why don’t they? Well, they’ve created a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t situation. For years, conservatives have been whipping up the base on the abortion issue precisely because invigorated anti-choicers are such a political asset. Abortion gets them out of the house and knocking on doors like few other issues can. Some churches that used to be multi-faceted have become entirely about hating on reproductive rights. People who want to control women have unflagging energy when it comes to pursuing their obsession. (Witness Saudi Arabia’s embrace of electronic monitoring of women to see how bad misogyny can get when left unchecked.) To give up the war on women would be to see many of those anti-choice supporters lose interest and walk away. And there’s no guarantee that disgusted pro-choicers would switch to voting Republican even if they did give up the war on women, as pro-choice people tend to be generally more liberal anyway.

But they should at least stop pretending that they just came up with the idea to attack abortion rights while declining to talk about it in public. They’ve been trying that strategy for years, and no one is buying what they’re selling.

]]>Arizona Senator John McCain is going maverick again. The Republican party elder and former presidential candidate is warning his party that if they want to win in 2012, they need to lay off the war over contraception, and start focusing on jobs again.

Speaking on Meet The Press, McCain admonished the party, stating “the GOP should pivot from the contraception issue and ‘get back on to what the American people really care about: jobs and the economy.’” He also worried that the contraception debate is leaving the impression that the “GOP is a party unfriendly to women.”

Really? Unfriendly to women? What tipped him off? The fight to deny women affordable access to contraception? The attempts to repeal the very health care reform legislation that would ensure women pay the same costs as men and eliminate “being female” as a “preexisting condition?” Was it the efforts underway to force women who want to terminate pregnancies to undergo medically unnecessary, expensive medical procedures–and pay for them? The fact that legislators want to force women to run like rats through a maze in meeting arbitrary waiting periods for an abortion they know they want? The bills not only legalizing but mandating that doctors lie to their female patients about the condition of a fetus? Or was it the bills to force women to to carry a child to term that has no hope of viability once its born because the medical issue wasn’t discovered–or perhaps just not revealed–until after 20 weeks?

Senator McCain may believe the GOP needs to be “less hostile” to women, but perhaps he should consider the adage that “charity begins at home,” and bring to bear his influence first on his home state. Arizona has now become the most “hostile” state in the nation when it comes to a woman’s reproductive rights, moving from supportive to completely against a woman’s right to choose in just one decade. According to Guttmacher’s Elizabeth Nash:

“There are very few states that are so heavily entrenched in working to restrict abortion access than Arizona. In the past three years, the legislature has seemingly spent all their time on abortion restrictions.”

Dear Senator, if you want to know why the GOP appears to be anti-women, you should visit home more often.

]]>http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/03/19/mccain-says-gop-hostile-to-women-maybe-he-should-look-at-home/feed/0For “Pro-Life” Republicans, Human Life is Cheaphttp://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2010/12/19/prolife-republicans-human-life-cheap/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=prolife-republicans-human-life-cheap
http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2010/12/19/prolife-republicans-human-life-cheap/#commentsSun, 19 Dec 2010 13:45:52 +0000The refusal of Senate Republicans, nearly all of whom identify as "pro-life," to support the 9/11 First Responders bill gives the question of what it means to be "pro-life" new urgency.

]]>What it means for a lawmaker to be “pro-life” is not a rhetorical question any more. The refusal of Senate Republicans, nearly all of whom identify as pro-life, to support the 9/11 First Responders bill, also known as the James Zadroga bill—a measure that would provide funding for healthcare for firefighters, police and others who became ill as a result of their 9/11 related work—gives this question new urgency.

The shameful spectacle of antiabortion Republicans preventing, as of this writing, the possibility of even a vote for this measure before the holiday recess also makes clear that this movement has gone beyond its historic valuing of the life of a fetus over that of a woman. Now it is mainly the male 9/11 workers whose lives are apparently expendable, because they cannot afford their own health care.

Similarly, years ago people began pointing out the fact that many lawmakers who are antiabortion also are strongly in favor of capital punishment. The response typically given by such politicians to these allegations of hypocrisy is that an abortion is the taking of an “innocent” life, while capital punishment takes the life of an evil-doer.

But the refusal to support the First Responders bill really is about a willingness to let people die—people who are not only “innocent” but brave and selfless individuals who saved others’ lives. The four responders who appeared recently on the Jon Stewart show—all white middle aged males—did not use euphemisms to describe their health problems that resulted from their work. “I’m dying,” one of Stewart’s guests, a policeman who can no longer afford needed care, flatly said.

It does not really matter if the Republican senators’ opposition to the First Responder bill is based on their professed concern about deficit spending (despite their recent support of extending tax cuts for the wealthiest, which adds hugely to the deficit) or simply a reluctance to let another Democratic measure pass in this lame duck session. What this sorry incident shows, to borrow a line from one of the greatest movies of all times, is that just as in the cinematic version of war-time Casablanca, human life is cheap in the real world of contemporary pro-life politicians.

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Meghan McCain’s most recent blog entry on the Daily Beast indirectly asks of us two questions: 1) Why is Meghan McCain writing a blog in the first place and 2) Why should anyone read it? Name recognition answers the first question, and as for the second question, there isn’t a single reason. To save you some time, I’ll condense a few of her rambling, inconsistent points.

Her entry begins by explaining how she first heard about sex during the Lewinsky scandal (how timely), and then mentions the apparent "double standards" politicians face with sex, specifically, "who is allowed to have sex with whom, what constitutes sex, and whether it’s appropriate, to name a few."

This doesn’t make sense. Politicians face the same standards as everyone else. All of the recent political sex scandals were breaches in very clear public standards: you shouldn’t cheat on your spouse, especially with a hooker, nor should you ever send sexually explicit messages to your teenage Congressional pages. Nothing suggests a double standard.

And then she turns to Bristol Palin,

"…as an 18-year-old adult, is free to make her own choices and decide how she wants her life to unfold. But for whatever reasons, the American public and media remain overly engrossed in our politicians’ sex lives and, as in this case, those of their families."

The reasons the media is "overly engrossed" in these types of stories is that they point out the widespread hypocrisy
of a pro-life, "moral" politician, and their inability to follow their own strict ideology. What’s really confusing is that right after McCain’s statement about women having the freedom to choose, McCain says, without a tinge of irony, "As a Republican, I am pro-life."

Before you can sort through the cognitive dissonance, she starts arguing against abstinence only education,

"but I want to be sure [my sister] knows being curious about sex is natural, and what is important is to be educated about safety."

And the GOP’s inability to discuss these issues,

"Because the GOP continues to struggle with open communication about serious issues most people deal with rationally, and on a regular basis."

The GOP doesn’t have a communication problem; they have a different viewpoint than Meghan McCain, of which they are quite vocal about. Maybe McCain is trying to justify her switch to the Republican Party, when her dad was running for president in 2008? But that would be selfish, right?

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Mitt Romney arrived at the House Republicans’ late-January retreat to a room that hardly needed a pep talk. Their vote against the Democrats’ Economic Recovery Act had revved them up; all Romney needed to tell them was that they “stood strong,” and that their fellow Republicans stood proud. Romney, who’d testified at the sole House Republican hearing on the stimulus, urged them to take one step further.

“We remain the confident voice of limited government and free enterprise,” said Romney. “These principles are going to face another test when it comes to health care. We should be first to propose a Republican plan to bring health insurance to all Americans, one based on market dynamics, free choice, and personal responsibility. Whatever direction we take, let’s not simply react to what the Democrats do.”

The House Republicans took Romney’s advice. Six days after his speech the party announced the formation of the House GOP Health Care Task Force, an ad hoc group of 16 members that would, in the words of Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) craft “real solutions to improve our health care system by putting patients before paperwork and frivolous lawsuits.”

As the stimulus debate winds to a close, it would appear that House Republicans are picking up their playbook and taking what they need for the coming battle over health care reform. But based on conversations with Republicans inside and outside of Congress, the right does not expect the strategy to work with health care, an issue that all consider strong Democratic turf. The Romney concept of “pre-empting” Democrats is a rearguard effort, something that will produce a list of Republican health care policies that the party can point to when Democrats charge them with obstruction, as they did with their for-show versions of a stimulus package. Republicans, who have developed a consensus about the virtues of tax cuts, have not done that same work on health care.

“Republicans have been absolutely dreadful on health care,” said John Goodman, the president of the National Center for Policy Analysis, who devised the first Health Savings Accounts in the 1980s and who helped craft Sen. John McCain’s health care policy in the 2008 campaign. “They’re always on defense, they always let the Democrats take the initiative, then they scramble to come up with alternatives.”

While the Republicans’ stimulus working group came out of the gate with a media strategy, a public hearing (with guests Romney and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman) and an uncontroversial package of tax cuts, the health care group is operating below the radar and concentrating on message before policy. At their first meeting, Republicans did not meet with heads of the health care industry or with policy wonks, but with Dave Winston of the Winston Group, a polling firm that does the bulk of its work for the GOP. The second meeting brought in Steve Burd, the CEO of Safeway, the supermarket chain that has donated a total of $18,498 to members of the task force, according to Opensecrets.org.

Reached by TWI Thursday, Winston confirmed that he showed Republicans polling data on whether Americans favor “private” or “government” solutions for health care. “By an overwhelming margin, people prefer private over government-run health care,” said Winston, “but you have this big group who say [they] want some combination of private and public solutions. And of course, that’s what we have now.”

Winston recommended that Republicans pull their plans off the shelf and “modernize them,” while warning them that their disadvantage on the issue is steep—Americans trust Democrats over Republicans on health care by anywhere from 15 to 30 percentage points.

Some critics of the House Republicans speculated that the health care task force was a vehicle for spin, not a sweatshop where ideas would be hammered out. The fact that the effort is headed by Blunt, the former whip whose portfolio has shrunk since handing that job to Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), perplexed some analysts who consider the less senior members of the task force, such as Rep. Ryan, more serious about health care.

“Paul Ryan is a real force in that conference,” said Len Nichols, the director of the Healthy Policy Program at the progressive New America Foundation, and the senior health care adviser for the Office of Management and Budget during President Clinton’s 1993-1994 push. “Ryan ought to be chairing this. But the Republicans don’t ask me what to do.”

Brendan Buck, a spokesman for task force member Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) disputed the idea that Republicans were “reactionary” on health care. “He has a comprehensive bill that’s he’s introduced every Congress,” said Buck. “That’s not reactive.”

Since the last significant health care reform, the 2003 passage of the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act, other Republican members in the House—not just Price—have introduced health care bills that propose reforms such as a refundable tax credit for health insurance and letting consumers purchase health care plans across state lines. But According to Goodman and other free-market health care reform advocates, the party has never taken reform seriously enough to come up with an agenda that can compete with the Democratic agenda.

“I don’t like it,” said Robert Moffit, the director of the Center for Health Policy Studies at the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation, “but there are people who mouth things about choice and free markets and don’t know what they’re saying.”

The Republicans’ stimulus playbook will be harder to apply to health care because the Senate, where Democrats had to work to broker a stimulus deal, is a softer sell on health care reform. Even after the losses of 2006 and 2008, the Senate includes several senior Republicans from safe seats who have been breaking bread with Democrats over health care. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), a dark horse candidate for Secretary of Health and Human Services, has collected five Republican co-sponsors for his Healthy Americans Act, which would cover uninsured Americans through, among other policy changes, employer taxes. Sen. Bob Bennett (R-Utah), a veteran of the 1993-1994 health care battle who wanted to make a deal with Democrats, is Wyden’s chief co-sponsor.

“He’s smart as hell,” said Nichols of Bennett, “and he wants some sort of bi-partisan reform.”

In their battle against the stimulus, Republicans could count not just on party unity, but ideological unity—few members of either House agree with the Democrats’ Keynsian approach to the economic crisis. On health care, the GOP’s message is far from figured out. While January’s stimulus working group ran a tight press shop that connected reporters to its members, calls to several of the health care task force members went unreturned while Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.) postponed an interview.

]]>http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2009/02/17/gop-playbook-useless-health-care-fight/feed/58Roundup: Ridge Says Running Mate Should Defer to McCain on Choicehttp://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2008/08/19/roundup-ridge-says-running-mate-should-defer-mccain-choice/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=roundup-ridge-says-running-mate-should-defer-mccain-choice
http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2008/08/19/roundup-ridge-says-running-mate-should-defer-mccain-choice/#commentsTue, 19 Aug 2008 11:35:54 +0000VP prospect Tom Ridge says GOP will accept a pro-choice running mate and that he would defer to McCain on choice, Does McCain have a woman problem?, More women that ever are childless, FDA review of Mifeprex returns no surprises.

]]>Ridge Says Running Mate Should Defer to McCain on Choice … Pro-choice Republican VP prospect Tom Ridge said Sunday that the GOP would accept a pro-choice running mate for John McCain especially considering that the job of the VP is to "echo the position of the president of the United States":

"I think that would be up to, first of all, to John to decide
whether he wants a pro-choice running mate; then we would have to see
how the Republican Party would rally around it," Ridge said. "At the
end of the day, I think the Republican Party will be comfortable with
whatever choice John makes."

McCain’s statement last week was
seen as an appeal to centrist voters. On Sunday, Ridge tried to soothe
conservatives by stating that McCain’s view on the issue would prevail
in a McCain administration.

"The last time I checked, the vice
president is not an independent voice. He echoes the position of the
president of the United States," Ridge said. "I think it’s the
responsibility of the vice president. If you’re unwilling or unable to
do that, then I think you should defer to someone else."

Does McCain Have a Problem with Women Voters? … The Obama campaign sent a memo to reporters yesterday morning posing this question: "Does McCain have a Woman Problem?"

In the memo, Senior Advisor for the Women’s Vote Dana Singiser argues
that "McCain’s attempt to bridge the gender gap has fallen flat. He fares worse among women than any presidential candidate since
Bob Dole in 1996," Singiser writes, citing polls showing Obama leading
McCain among women.

Singiser claims that "McCain cannot close the gender gap" because
(1) "[w]omen voters don’t trust McCain because of his extreme positions
on the key issues they care about" and (2) "[w]omen want change from
the last 8 years of neglect for America’s middle class families and
women’s economic security."

The memo spotlights issues important to women that the campaign
suggests help Obama attract female voters by virtue of his positions.
Among them are equal pay, health care costs, reproductive rights, and
access to contraception and family planning services. "61% of women strongly support putting more emphasis on reducing
unintended pregnancies, including access to birth control and other
family planning services," Singiser writes in the section on
contraception and family planning. She adds: "McCain has repeatedly voted against funding for family
planning, accessibility of contraceptives for women, and ensuring that
sex education is scientifically accurate. Obama believes that women
should have access to affordable family planning and believes that our
children should have access to comprehensive age-appropriate sex
education."

More Women Than Ever Are Childless … The New York Times is reporting that a new Census Bureau report reveals women are waiting longer to have children, and more women than ever are choosing not to have children at all:

Twenty percent of women ages 40 to 44 have no children, double the
level of 30 years ago, the report said; and women in that age bracket
who do have children have fewer than ever — an average of 1.9 children,
compared with the median of 3.1 children in 1976.

“A lot of
women are not having any children,” said Jane Lawler Dye, a Census
Bureau researcher who did the report, which looked at women of
childbearing age in 2006. “It used to be sort of expected that there
was a phase of life where you had children, and a lot of women aren’t
doing that now,” Ms. Dye said.

FDA Approval, Oversight of Mifeprex ‘Consistent’ With Other Drugs, GAO Report Says … Three Republican Congressmen had asked the GAO to look investigate the approval process of Mifeprex, perhaps more commonly known as RU-486, in response to potential complications with the drug reports the Daily Women’s Health Policy Report:

According to The Hill,
critics of FDA’s actions in relation to Mifeprex have focused on three
areas — the level of clinical evidence on safety the agency required;
the agency’s use of an approval process for drugs used to treat serious
or life-threatening conditions under "Subpart H"; and FDA’s reaction to
reports of potentially serious side effects. For the report, GAO
compared the process used for Mifeprex with the process used for other
drugs given expedited approval but for limited distribution through
medical specialists under Subpart H. The report states that the
"approval process for Mifeprex was generally consistent with the
approval processes for other Subpart H restricted drugs," The Hill reports.

]]>Catholics Asked to Tell Their Bishops to End Ban on Contraception … Catholics for Choice has launched a campaign to get Catholics all over the world to contact their bishops in an effort to pressure the Vatican to end its mostly-ignored but still harmful 40-year ban on contraception. In conjunction with the campaign the group relaesed an in-depth look at the history of the ban, a document called Truth & Consequence: A Look behind the Vatican’s Ban on Contraception (PDF). The Catholics for Choice media relaese on the campaign, linked above, provides a taste of what Truth & Consequense explains in greater detial:

Forty years ago, a
decision was announced that has had a catastrophic impact on the poor
and powerless around the world. On July 25, 1968, Pope Paul VI slammed
the door on the hopes of the vast majority of Catholics and confirmed a
complete prohibition on modern methods of contraception. The papal
encyclical Humanae Vitae was a defining moment in modern church history
and continues to be a source of great conflict and division in the
church.

It
is a little-known fact that before Humanae Vitae was released the
hand-picked Vatican Birth Control Commission voted overwhelmingly to
recommend that the church rescind its ban on artificial contraception.
However, the pope rejected that recommendation and today, the rupture
that Humanae Vitae caused between the Vatican and lay Catholics remains.

Jon
O’Brien, president of Catholics for Choice, called on Catholics to
contact their bishop and tell them that the ban must end. In their
calls and e-mails, Catholics should press their bishops to contact the
Vatican, explain the will of Catholics worldwide and call for an end to
the ban on contraception. He said, “It is well known that Catholics,
particularly those in the global north, have ignored this ban. It is
time for them to speak out and say enough is enough. We need Catholics
to pick up the telephone or send an e-mail to their local bishop saying
that it is time to change church policy. Less-privileged people—who
often only have access to health care through Catholic-run facilities
or live in countries where the Catholic hierarchy has considerable
influence over public policy—are dying as a result of the ban.”

Planned Parenthood Launches Ad Highlighting McCain’s Viagra-Birth Control Gaffe … Almost two weeks ago now we ran in Roundup the video of John McCain squirming in slience in response to a question about Viagra being covered by many insurance companies while birth control is not. Planned Parenthood is betting that McCain’s silence will speak volumes to voters, especially women, who are not aware of his anti-contraception votes in the Senate.

The Washington Post’s political blog, The Trail, has more on the ad, including in which states it will run:

The group cites a Guttmacher Institute study
that reports "nearly all sexually active women have used at least one
method of birth control," and the women spend more money on health care
costs than men, partly because of birth control supplies and services.

The ad will air in Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, New Mexico, Ohio,
Wisconsin and Washington, D.C. during local cable ad buys on Bravo’s "Project Runway," which makes its season debut tonight. (MoveOn.org has also advertised during the show, which is popular with women.) The ad will also air during local breaks on Lifetime’s "Army Wives" and in some states it will air on broadcast stations during "The Oprah Winfrey Show."

While the group would not disclose the cost of the ad buy, it is part of Planned Parenthood’s $10 million "kNOw McCain" campaign designed to educate and register women voters.

The new ad got Bill O’Reilly all wound up late last week. Check out the video:

Although O’Reilly may not know it, preventing unwanted pregnancies is not just another “choice.” It is “central to good health care for women.” According to NARAL, 98 percent of women “use some form of birth control during their reproductive years” to “control the timing and spacing of their pregnancies, which in turn reduces the incidence of maternal death, low birth weight babies, and infant mortality.”

Failure to cover birth control also places women at an unfair disadvantage “by singling out for unfavorable treatment a health insurance need that only they have.” According to the National Women’s Law Center:

Failure to cover contraception forces women to bear higher health care costs to avoid pregnancy, and exposes women to the unique physical, economic, and emotional consequences that can result from unintended pregnancy.

With opinions like these, O’Reilly won’t have to worry about buying anyone dinner.

TP is right on but forgets to mention that many women take birth control pills to treat a medical condition and those medical conditions are generally considered more critical health concerns than erectile disfunction. Sorry, Bill O, you’re wrong yet again.

Baby Dead After Mother Apparently Gives Herself an Abortion … The Chicago Sun-Times has published an early report from a sad scene on Chicago’s Far South Side:

Police are conducting a death investigation after a woman apparently
gave herself an abortion inside a vehicle on the Far South Side early
Sunday.

Baby boy Johnson was found unresponsive in the back seat of a vehicle
at 708 W. 103rd St., according to the Cook County Medical Examiner’s
office. The baby was pronounced dead at the scene at 6:20 a.m.

An autopsy Sunday revealed the boy died from asphyxia, the medical examiner’s office said. His death has been ruled a homicide.

Police responded to the 103rd Street address about 5:15 a.m. when they
found that a mother had apparently given herself an abortion, according
to a Calumet Area police sergeant.

Detectives remain on the scene at 6:20 a.m., according to the sergeant,
who said he did not immediately know the mother’s condition.

Calumet Area detectives are conducting a death investigation.

We will follow the story as it develops and we may or may not find out why this woman decided to give herself an abortion but these avoidable tragedies will become more common if the far right succeeds in it’s efforts to overtrun Roe v. Wade.

Catching Up on Sex Education … The Des Moines Register ran a story yesterday on the state of sex education in Iowa. While Iowa refused federal funds for abstinence-only education this past year a private organization called Sexual Health Education Inc., which received $3 million in federal funds last year, that works with 30 schools in Eastern Iowa. In Iowa state education officials leave sex education up to local schools. The Department of Education doesn’t track what schools teach. Proponents of comprehensive sex education, which emphasize abstinence but also teach safe sex methods, are confident that the facts are reasching Americans and that things will change with a new administration in the White House:

"My sense is that once the Bush administration leaves … comprehensive
education will kind of prevail," said David Popenoe, a Rutgers
University professor who founded the National Marriage Project.

]]>http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2008/07/21/roundup-catholics-campaign-against-contraception-ban/feed/1Roundup: McCain’s Crude Jokes and His Stances on Abortion and Birth Controlhttp://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2008/07/18/roundup-mccains-crude-jokes-and-his-stances-abortion-and-birth-control/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=roundup-mccains-crude-jokes-and-his-stances-abortion-and-birth-control
http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2008/07/18/roundup-mccains-crude-jokes-and-his-stances-abortion-and-birth-control/#commentsFri, 18 Jul 2008 09:49:18 +0000Olbermann and Maddow take on the serious matter of McCain's crude jokes, McCain speaks out against abortion and birth control, Hillary Clinton and Patty Murray condemn Bush's anti-contraception proposal, The Daily Show takes on the term 'cougar'.

]]>The Serious Matter of McCain’s Crude Jokes … John McCain’s ‘sense of humor’ may just be a red flag for a man who disregards women as something lesser than men. On MSNBC’s Countdown last night Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow examined some of the crude anti-woman jokes McCain has told, in public, throughout his career in Washington. The McCain campaign did not really apologize for the jokes, including one about an ape raping a woman, saying instead that these jokes are examples of "McCain being McCain" and evidence of his "authenticity."

Sen. John McCain went out of his way to speak
against abortion twice today at a town hall meeting before a friendly
audience that vigorously applauded a range of conservative proposals.
It’s a subject he rarely raises on the campaign trail unless asked
directly about it—and one where Democrats think they have the edge.

…

“I also would like to say one other thing very quickly to you–that
is I am proud of my record of protecting and advocating the rights of
the unborn. I believe this is also an important issue,” he said. He
said the noblest words every written were the rights to “life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness.”

…

Abortion rights advocates believe that many voters mistakenly believe
that McCain supports abortion rights and that they will be less
inclined to vote for him once they realize he does not.

So, John McCain is so opposed to contraception he voted against
requiring insurance plans to cover it like other drugs, and either so
indifferent to women’s health and rights or just so out of it he
doesn’t even remember how he voted. That’s the way to show American
women you really care.

This is not a trivial issue. There’s
the basic unfairness of not covering these essential—even
life-saving—drugs and devices, so fundamental to women’s health and
well-being. And then he adds the insult of denying coverage while men
are lavished with cut-rate erections. There’s the craven submission to
religious extremists that moves the politics of that denial.

It’s
a pocketbook issue too: A year’s worth of contraception can cost a
woman $600. That’s a lot of money. Is it too much to expect the next
president of the United States to understand that? Especially now that
every politician in America prides himself on knowing the price of a
gallon of milk, and talks like he’s just finished doing the week’s
shopping for a family of 10?

Murray and
Clinton said the proposed rule change is a "poorly veiled attempt to
roll back women’s health care options before the current Administration
leaves office."

…

"This
misguided attempt to restrict health care services and limit access to
contraceptives defeats our common goal of reducing the number of
abortions in this country," said Murray.

They said one of
the most troubling aspects of the proposed rule is the overly-broad
definition of "abortion."

"This definition would allow
health-care corporations or individuals to classify many common forms
of contraception – including the birth control pill, emergency
contraception and IUDs – ‘abortions,’ and therefore to refuse to
provide contraception to women who need it," they said.

Murray and Clinton go on to say "the regulations could even undermine
state laws that ensure survivors of sexual assault and rape receive
emergency contraception in hospital emergency rooms."

The far-right blogs have been strangely slient on this development. The Catholic World News did publish a short piece simply restating the major aspects of the proposed rule change with no mention that it will have the effect of severely limiting women’s access to birth control pills and IUDs.

Daily Show’s Senior Women’s Issues Commentator Kristen Schaal Takes on the ‘Cougar’ Label … After all this seriousness we need some comic relief and there’s nobody doing comic relief right now better than the Daily Show. Kristen Schaal goes to great lenghts to prove to Jon Stewart that the term ‘cougar’ is dehumanizing:

]]>Bush Abortion Proposal Sets Condition for Federal Health Funds … The New York Times reports in an article quoted here in full:

The Bush administration wants to require all recipients
of aid under federal health programs to certify that they will not
refuse to hire nurses and other providers who object to abortion and even certain types of birth control.

Under the draft of a proposed rule, hospitals, clinics, researchers and medical schools would have to sign “written certifications” as a prerequisite to getting money under any program run by the Department of Health and Human Services.

Such
certification would also be required of state and local governments,
forbidden to discriminate, in areas like grant-making, against
hospitals and other institutions that have policies against providing
abortion.

The proposal, which circulated in the department on
Monday, says the new requirement is needed to ensure that federal money
does not “support morally coercive or discriminatory practices or
policies in violation of federal law.” The administration said Congress
had passed a number of laws to ensure that doctors, hospitals and
health plans would not be forced to perform abortions.

In the
proposal, obtained by The New York Times, the administration says it
could cut off federal aid to individuals or entities that discriminate
against people who object to abortion on the basis of “religious
beliefs or moral convictions.”

The proposal defines abortion as
follows: “any of the various procedures — including the prescription,
dispensing and administration of any drug or the performance of any
procedure or any other action — that results in the termination of the
life of a human being in utero between conception and natural birth,
whether before or after implantation.”

Mary Jane Gallagher,
president of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health
Association, which represents providers, said, “The proposed definition
of abortion is so broad that it would cover many types of birth
control, including oral contraceptives and emergency contraception.”

“We
worry that under the proposal, contraceptive services would become less
available to low-income and uninsured women,” Ms. Gallagher said.

Indeed,
among other things the proposal expresses concern about state laws that
require hospitals to provide emergency contraception to rape victims who request it.

Nancy
Keenan, president of Naral Pro-Choice America, said, “Why on earth is
the Bush administration trying to discourage doctors and clinics from
providing contraception to women who need it?”

Christina Pearson,
a spokeswoman for the department, declined to discuss the draft. “We
don’t normally comment on whether we are considering changes in
regulations,” she said.

Just in time for the general election. Looks like the Rovian divide-with-wedge-issues-and-conquer style of politics didn’t leave the Bush Whitehouse with Karl Rove himself. RH Reality Check will be following this story as it develops.

Denying Birth Control the Height of Arrogance … In perfect segue from the previous story Dan Thomasson of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer opines that pharmacists who refuse to fill women’s birth control prescriptions are exhibiting "unmitigated arrogance." The Bush administration wants to protect medical professionals from being discriminated against by employers for their beliefs that birth control and abortion are morally wrong while creating the legal justification for discrimination against women who choose to avail themselves of these legal and rightful services.

Thomasson begins:

A rape victim walks into a pharmacy with a prescription for a morning-after
pill that will terminate a possible pregnancy and is told politely it will not
be filled, and that she must go elsewhere, no matter how inconvenient. That is,
if the pharmacist has the decency even to return the prescription.

The message is clear: Tough luck. If a child has been conceived in the
violation of her body, it is the victim’s sacred duty to have the baby.

Another woman, whose body will not support a pregnancy, submits a
prescription for simple birth control pills and is also rejected. Or a young man
and woman in the throes of hormonal conflict seek a package of condoms but can’t
purchase one, and then end up victims of normal, post-pubescent passion.

Are those and other examples exaggerations? Hardly. They are manifestations
of a real effort by a growing movement of political- and religious-based groups
to withhold access to birth control and anti-abortion measures through
pharmaceutical denial.

And, later, continues:

Realizing that I am about to bring down the wrath of those who see themselves
as ordained guardians of our morals, I’m going to say it anyway:

What unmitigated arrogance! This kind of sanctimony has no place in a
regulated and necessary business. Those who seek a right to dispense
pharmaceuticals should never be allowed to pick and choose which prescriptions
they honor based on extraneous considerations such as religious convictions or
mere assertions that it violates their own personal codes.

Whether they disapprove of the drug on moral grounds is completely beside the
point. They should follow the doctor’s orders unless they suspect some
irregularity, and that is that. If they can’t agree with that, they should find
another profession.

Jon Stewart on McCain, Fiorina, Viagra and Birth Control … I was waiting all weekend to see what Jon Stewart and the Daily Show would do with last weeks comedy involving Senator McCain and his advisor Carly Fiorina’s comments that it is unfair for health insruance companies to cover Viagra and not birth control. It was worth the wait. The bit starts at 4:50:

A team of executives and a doctor will answer questions about sexual
health concerns, breast-related problems, sexually transmitted
infections, contraception, pregnancy, infertility, abortions, menopause
and puberty and explain the functioning of the reproductive systems of
males and females in the context of queries.

…

The target audiences are from the small and medium towns in the
Hindi heartland states of Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Madhya
Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Haryana.

"These are the states where the rates of fertility, infant
mortality and maternal deaths are very high and awareness about sexual
health abysmally poor owing to a combination of socio-economic factors
and scant access to information," the fund’s executive director
Shailaja Chandra said.

Teaching SRE to deaf children brings additional challenges, as deaf
pupils don’t ‘overhear’ and may miss comments and discussions that
inform hearing children. In addition some deaf children have
a very literal understanding of words and may have difficulty
understanding the many terms in SRE that require subtle interpretation.
They may understand the textbook terms but not the euphemisms that also
arise in such discussions. It is important we address these
issues as children who do not get a good SRE are more vulnerable to
abuse because they may not recognise inappropriate behaviour or that
their boundaries are being crossed.

15 Year Old Student Educating Peers About Sex … The Los Angeles Times is running a great story about Andreina Cordova, a high school student in LA who has been a Planned Parenthood peer education since she was 13. Definitely give the article a read as it is another great example of young students trying to fill in the gaps that bad federal sex education policy has created over the past 7 years in this country.

Lieberman Unlikely to Get VP Nod Due to RH Policy Stances … Despite sharing a close relationship with John McCain, not to mention hardline stances on Iraq, Iran and other foreign policy issues, Joe Lieberman is a long shot for a VP nod writes Hans Nichols. His pro-woman and pro-choice reproductive health votes will even further alienate the already shunned social conservatives in the GOP. No doubt McCain will choose a staunchly anti-choice politician for the VP slot to try and shore up the voting bloc that has put every republican president in office since 1980. Perhaps, as Scott Swenson notes, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin?